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LinkedIn launches Lookup, a standalone app to help you tap your co-workers’ skills

LinkedIn has launched a new standalone iOS app called LinkedIn Lookup today in a bid to help users make better use of their co-workers’s skills.

The company says it conducted research that suggests many corporate employees feel they could do a better job if they knew how to find out who else in the company had specific skills, and that most resorted to looking at LinkedIn rather than their own company’s often outdated intranet listings.

To tap into this use-case, LinkedIn’s Lookup app allows you to search for co-workers by name, title, current or past experience, education and specific skills.

Once you’ve found the person you’re looking for, you can dig a bit deeper and check out all the usual relevant work info that you’d find on LinkedIn, such as title, work experience, education, top skills, work email address, etc. This works for contacts who you’re not actually connected with on LinkedIn too.

You can also set your contact preferences in the app too, thereby allowing co-workers to see your phone number to get in touch, for example. If no preference is set, the app sends an email directly to the linked work email address, or you can send a message within Lookup.

Co-workers can message each other in this way, even if they haven’t downloaded Lookup and messages sent to LinkedIn Inboxes via Lookup don’t count towards the number of InMails users receive each month.

Ben is European Editor of The Next Web with a focus on startups, gadgets and lifestyle tech. Now a technology journalist with a specialism in mobile devices and a geeky love of mobile spectrum issues. Ben used to be a professional online poker player.
You can contact him on ben@thenextweb.com , via Twitter or on Google+.